#plague journal

[madhaiku]

from Plague Journal

[basilesroom]

Samedi 2 mai 2020

My best friend found this conlang called “Toki Pona” so we’re learning it together because obviously I have nothing better to do like.. my finals or anything

So if I may,

ken la tempo kama la mi toki pona e toki pona

[btlk-like]

Life should be a long drawn affair of yellow.

[bomberqueen17]

catch up

sigh my back is still really stiff from chicken slaughter day and i am pretty confident that if i took the time to do a solid yoga thing about it I could sort it out but I have not actually had or taken the time to do that. maybe now that i live in my own house again I can, except that my own house has no floorspace. but. i could collect my thoughts to that extent, possibly.

Friday I did school with the kids most of the day and then we had a final Goodbye Apprentices dinner that I cooked some for and then Saturday was nuts because I had to pack all my things up and watch Farmkid for a bit and then go get BIL from the farmer’s market so he could come home and do some work, and in the midst of that Sister came stomping in from chores covered in ice (it was 20 degrees out, the First Cold Morning, for which they’d been preparing all week and still weren’t ready because the First Cold Morning is always when Everything Breaks on the farm, especially the livestock watering equipment) and said to me, “I was trying to help,” and i said, “what” because that’s never good.

(this cut is just for length, it’s just a lot of life story here)

Well it transpires that my car doesn’t have a functioning blower motor for the ventilation system. I know it did as of last weekend because I drove it, but then it’s mostly been moved from parking space to parking space around the farm since then.

She’d also ripped one of the windshield wiper blades off because it was frozen but she’d retrieved all the pieces so I could easily put them back on. We have these carefully-researched wiper blades that Dude painstakingly acquired for us at some point and they really are fantastic wipers but they fall off at the slightest provocation, which is nerve-wracking. I fixed that without a problem, but as for the ventilation system... when you turn the fan knob to any of the “on” positions, there’s a loud and distinct “click” from inside the dashboard way over on the passenger side. Not hopeful.

Dad came over for unrelated reasons, so while he was there I asked him what he thought it’d be. (I had not attempted to work it out on my own because I had to go get BIL, so I took the farmfam’s car instead, and left mine parked in the sun.) We poked at various things, and read the owner’s manual which was spectacularly unhelpful, mostly being full of instructions to use features not available at the trim level I actually purchased on this car. Dad settled on checking the fuses, and I was rather pleased with myself that when he complained there was no diagram to say which fuse was what, I pulled one up on my phone instantly. (It turns out there was a diagram, on the inside of the lid, which he had not looked at, so I felt a little better, but it was in fact the same diagram as the shady ad-filled Car Fuse Box Diagrams site I’d Googled had, so the shady ads I was being shown were upfront enough at least.) 

Anyway I learned where all the fuses in my car are, and that automotive fuses are standardized on several wildly different formats that aren’t named anywhere on them so truly, if you need one, bring the broken one into the auto parts store in your pocket because there’s literally no other way to tell which kind you need. (Fortunately, that’s an old trick in our family book; always bring the broken bit to the hardware store if it weighs under forty pounds, and if it’s over, maybe bring it in the car anyway so you can compare the new one right away.)

I replaced the fuse on my own (there were two fuses, and of course only one spare in the car-- for the record, your car probably has two fuse boxes, one in the dashboard and one under the hood, and the one under the hood very often has spares in the lid, and mine promised it’d have a fuse puller there too but that was an actual lie but a pair of tweezers will work and as it happens, my fingers are small enough that I just used them and was fine), and as I’d expected, that did not do it (I feel like if the fuse was blown the relay wouldn’t even make the click noise as it tried to turn on), so.

I was worried I’d have to bag my intended overnight stop in Rochester, without a functional windshield defroster, but a quick check of my weather app confirmed that it wasn’t expected to dip below freezing in Rochester that night, so I went ahead as planned.

I dropped BIL back off at the farmer’s market (he’d driven the truck in and helped set up, and then was needed to drive the truck back home), but not before he poked under the hood, declared he didn’t know how a blower motor looked when it needed replacing either, said I should put in more engine coolant and windshield washer fluid, helped me do both when we stopped at the auto parts place to get a fuse (discovered I didn’t really need coolant, it had just been cold and shrunk below the fill line, I shrugged and topped it off a little anyway and am just glad that’s not leaking, it’s not like oil where you might lose some, or not supposed to be anyway), and then said farewell.

I got onto the Thruway and put MM and DF’s address into Maps, and the arrival time was showing me slightly earlier than I’d meant to get there. (They were having a Halloween party for the neighbor kids, outdoors with masks, so. Normally I’d be all about that but In These Times I’m like oh definitely no.) So I set the cruise at Maximal Gas Efficiency Speed (also for the record: slower is better for that too, I just normally drive like a bat out of hell on the Thruway out of pure boredom) and, extravagantly, stopped at a rest stop. (Which was futile, as the starbucks was closed of course, but then I bought candy so I could make myself faintly sick in honor of the holiday, which worked a treat.)

I still arrived just as the kids were leaving. Their neighborhood, which is a moderately wealthy inner suburb, was very clear about its various Halloween intentions; at dusk, several families were setting up tables in their driveway with lit Jack-O’Lanterns on them, and most of them had set up little fire pits two meters away and some chairs for the household members to sit in, to hang out outdoors and enjoy whatever trick or treating was going to happen. You could just glance down the street and see; 3/4 of the houses had their lights off, but the ones who were open had active open fires, so. Absolutely zero confusion there.

It’s the kind of street that’s a destination street for kids from other less-walkable neighborhoods, and also the neighborhood itself is chock-full of kids. MM has always felt it a duty to put out a big spread on Halloween, and has always been pleased to be a destination neighborhood. But, tonight, she had the light off, because her kids are still too little to really man an open fire pit in the front yard.

We had the classic sit around in the tiny kitchen party we’ve been having a while now, because what always happens is the kids put the TV on and then aggressively shush anyone who wants to talk, so we sit in the kitchen which doesn’t have chairs and we all wind up on the floor just laughing and laughing.

At bedtime, Girlchild, who turned six this summer, had a proper like two-year-old screaming-sobbing meltdown. She’s not doing well with the whole *gestures broadly* situation. The next day she had a sobbing meltdown over being asked to choose what kind of sandwich she wanted for lunch. What’s improved slightly since I was there, though, was that when she came back down, more composed and hiccuping slightly, Dr. F sat with her and very calmly and quietly and methodically went through the options with her and kept her calm as well and helped her choose, and it worked really well. He’s supposed to finally be able to step back from the one job he had that he gave notice to in like June, as of November, and should have more time to be home with the kids. (They’ve consulted all sorts of doctors and counselors and therapists and everyone agrees that Girlchild is indeed suffering from the whole situation but unfortunately since fixing the whole situation isn’t happening, she’s just going to have to take a little more time and everyone do the best they can; MM was in surprisingly good humor about it because she said the neighbor kid Girlchild’s exact age had spent two hours scream-sobbing on the next door porch earlier in the week, steadily refusing comfort from every one of his siblings and parents, and all the parents agreed that yeah there are a lot of kids who just aren’t really coping very well with all this, and a lot of adults too, and it’s grim but at least nobody really feels alone in it.) (At the very least, she’s getting closer with her neighbors; it costs her a lot of spoons to make small talk but it helps to feel like you’re not in this by yourself, so it’s taken this to really get her to go for it, but she has, and they are mostly nice enough people.)

Anyway, that was my one extravagant excursion outside of my isolation pod, and now I’m locking myself back down.

Unfortunately it is Dr F’s 40th birthday in about a week and a half, and he’s never had a birthday party in the 21 years I’ve known him but he wants to this time of course. However, he super gets it, so he was suggesting possibilities we could do masked, and likely, we’ll do a bonfire in the backyard. Because of course his family’s being careful but the kids are in school, there’s no way to properly have an isolation pod with the kids in school. You do what you can, and obviously, those kids need school. (Girlchild both hates and loves going to school, and super-clearly needs the socialization, but it’s terrible for her anxiety, but she really really needs the socialization, and Boychild is so extroverted that the two days a week they get of in-person school is barely enough for him and he is ravenous for attention at all times. Fortunately he’s a bit more robust, mentally, if for no other reason than because he’s almost 8, and is pretty philosophical about it, and occasionally he’ll just come tell his family “i need attention” and they’ll say “okay” and watch him dance or something.)

Anyway. I need to get my car fixed and do some work and maybe I’ll do yoga at work while the film transfers are rewinding or something, I gotta do something here. Sorry that was a wall-o-text, I’ll try to come back and fix it on DW. I’m just feeling a bit overwhelmed and need to write it down.

[shadowfromthestarlight]

Science Says

Becoming worshippers at the altar of ‘Science.’ Bad for our health, bad for science, bad for society.

This article, on our culture’s “consumer-science fantasy,” is one of the best I’ve read on the pandemic so far.

[apesoformythoughts]

“In my childhood I had often yearned for a sign coming out of that unfathomable mystery. I wanted a telegram from the transcendent; anything would do, a falling star, an angel, a vision. I longed for burning letters to be inscribed across the screen of my imagination. One summer, after a plunge into Malory’s Morte d’Arthur and the medieval legends of knight-saints, I strained my eyes upon the darkened mountains, yearning, yearning for the appearance of a white stag with a cross in his antlers who would tell me what I was for and what word I was to bear into the world. He never came. I’m still waiting.”

— Plague Journal

[cymothoid]

:) a pt coughed right in my face yesterday and i didnt have eye protection.

fml.

[plaguejournal]

Love in the time of plague

I got married on the Monday before lockdown.

We wanted to get married in May. We had something beautiful planned. People bought plane tickets, we’d signed contracts, everything was ready to go.  

But then things started getting bad.  This was before the bans on gathering, before social distancing became a mantra. We saw what was coming, though, and we knew we had to make the decision quickly.  We thought about our family and friends, putting themselves at risk to travel. We thought about the people our family and friends would interact with while traveling. We thought about the healthcare workers  who will be on the front lines of this in a few days.  So we delayed our wedding five months and decided to elope. We chose 3/18 and got everything prepared for it.

Except then Monday morning, we found out the courts were closing.

We were DETERMINED to save our right to marry (that we’ve only had for five years) from the maw of the virus. So, with one hour’s notice, two of our friends threw together the most splendid ceremony we could have hoped for. We stood in the front yard of our friends’ house.  Neighbors gathered to watch, standing 6 feet apart in the cul de sac. A little girl we didn’t know threw flowers for us. Someone brought his dog (what’s a wedding without a dog?  Boring.  It’s boring). Someone gave us a bottle of champagne. Someone else brought flowers from her daughter’s baby shower and made us bouquets, while yet another person lent me her grandmother’s pearls because we’d forgotten the ones from my own grandma.  My wife’s best friend stood by her, our hostess stood by me because my family was in other cities and states, and my sister joined on video chat. We got married mere hours before the gathering ban was handed down, and it was incredible.

I love our wedding story. It’s only two weeks old, but god I love our wedding story. In the midst of a pandemic, we got married. In the middle of heinous bigotry, xenophobia, and racism, we got married. I don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow, but I know who I’ll be with.

As a wedding gift to us, please consider doing a couple of things:

1) Stay home. Flatten the curve. Even when you think that quick trip to the grocery store isn’t a big deal, trust me - it is.  Try going just once a week.  Only take what you need.  Respect senior hours.  Don’t shop at the first of the month, when people on fixed incomes get their checks.

2) We all miss our friends and family right now.  If we don’t visit them now, we will get to visit them later.

3) Find racism and xenophobia and stamp that shit out. If you can afford it right now, intentionally order delivery from Asian-owned restaurants and go to Asian-owned grocery stores. Correct people who call COVID-19 “China flu” or “Wuhan flu.” Protect our Asian community members.

4) Respond with love. Whatever you see, respond with love (and whimsy, if you have any to spare).

- Chloe Deng